Creating a series of updatable guidelines to help ensure that the whole business buys into the new vision of Lotus Cars at retail.

For a design team, there’s nothing like a good guideline. What better way of capturing all you have collectively achieved with your clients?

But the issue with guidelines are they are usually ‘after the event’ records, rather than the living, breathing documents of intention and direction which are more useful and more necessary.

In the case of large roll-out programmes, understanding where boundaries lie may not be understood until you’ve started to implement the things that need documenting. But you need those same boundaries in place so as your audiences don’t start making up their own! It’s easy, therefore to be facing a double problem - a real Catch-22!

Our answer to this conundrum - how to keep it live, rather than pickle and preserve - is to take an ‘editorial’ mindset and tell a story. This works much more effectively than trying to use a command and control stricture to drive our creativity. As a result, our documents become a magnet for clients and partners, drawing them towards the future rather than repelling them, and helping to encourage, steer and nurture an emerging culture.

The initial guidelines in this series - the Lotus Retail Identity Lookbook, Signage Guidebook and Field Team Pocketbook - were officially launched in early summer 2021. The positive reception and high level of usage meant that the scope and scale of the series was expanded to include 10 titles, some now in their fifth edition.

While the timing of the Covid pandemic was tricky, the resultant restrictions give the team more time to do background work than might be usual - allowing them to present even better answers and solve more problems.

Each of the series (just the Lotus Retail Identity Lookbook, Signage Guidebook and Field Team Pocketbook are illustrated here) are designed as helpful, legible and clearly organised documents that help people in the field, working with the retailers, to have all the most helpful facts and figures at their fingertips.

They now have at their fingertips everything needed for those moments when someone has a question about process, cost or any aspect of the shape of the future. And to make that future familiar.

These guideline are regularly revisited and updated. Because, after all, a guideline needs to be a living document, so that it can guide you not only today but also tomorrow.